As much as us Open Source folks probably loath working with anything Microsoft, and as much as I myself try to always find the Open Source alternative to any business application, I think this could be an interesting and compelling UC integration for selling Asterisk into enterprise organizations. Most big businesses aren’t ready to ditch their proprietary software nor are they ready to kick out the Microsoft guy who sits on their board, so by integrating Asterisk with OCS 2007, you can somewhat sideline some of the Open Source concerns while still deploying an IP PBX in the background that is based on Asterisk. I hate to say it, but Microsoft OCS has a pretty sexy user interface and unlike Cisco Call Manager which is also sexy, Microsoft OCS will at least integrate with Asterisk.

It looks like this type of integration is still in its early stages and there’s certainly some bugs to be ironed out. For example, Asterisk uses SIP over UDP while OCS 2007 uses SIP over TCP. There are workarounds available but sometime soon I’m sure that Asterisk will support SIP over TCP while at the same time OCS 2007 should soon use SIP over UDP, both of which sound to be in the works.

I’d be interested to hear from this community whether anyone has already done some work with Asterisk and OCS 2007. What other hurdles did you encounter and how well has this integration been received? I’m sure soon we’ll be doing this type of integration as a fantastic means to continue deploying Asterisk to satisfy the communication requirements of large enterprises but either way this is all just another testament to Asterisk ability to integrate with almost anything!